Learning and Career Development with Technology: Examining the Effects on Knowledge Acquisition and Skills Building of Integrating Arc-GIS in a Marketing Course

With the prevailing global knowledge economy, higher education institutions must continue to ensure that their students have strong critical thinking, problem- solving, collaboration, teamwork, and decision making skills. This is so that students can be career and future ready upon graduation from school. Consequently, it is critical that courses, particularly the upper level ones, are designed and taught in a manner that allows the mastery of skills and competencies that are in high demand by employers. At Winthrop University, faculty members make use of technology tools and applications in the classroom to offer learning experiences that are challenging, engaging, relevant, and yet fulfilling. Since 2010, Geological Information Systems (GIS) has been used as a learning tool in marketing courses at the University. The application has been specifically introduced in those courses to meet both programmatic goals and help students gain real-world business skills. This session reports on a problem learning class project developed for junior and senior business majors at Winthrop University. The project, which uses the Arc-GIS application, was specifically designed to instill both critical learning and career readiness skills to the students taking the course. The session will present scaffolding activities implemented by the faculty of the course to help the students build confidence with using the Arc-GIS tool. In addition, the session will present the students perceptions to using of the Arc-GIS tool and their reactions to their involvement on the project. Further, this session will discuss instructional design strategies and explore issues related to how affordances that are imbed in many modern learning tools and classroom technologies can be leveraged to foster the acquisition of critical thinking, collaboration and career-readiness skills by students